Unsere Fremden

Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fair-such are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is the complete collection of short fiction from the world-renowned Lydia Davis.<BR><BR>WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013.<BR><BR>'Big rejoicing: Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker International prize. Never did a book award deliver such a true match-winning punch. Best of all, a new audience will read her now and find her wit, her vigour and rigour, her funniness, her thoughtfulness, and the precision of form, which mark Davis out as unique.<BR><BR>Daring, excitingly intelligent and often wildly comic [she] reminds you, in a world that likes to bandy its words about, what words such as economy, precision and originality really mean. This is a writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust. <BR><BR>A two-liner from Davis, or a seemingly throwaway paragraph, will haunt. What looks like a game will open to deep seriousness; what looks like philosophy will reveal playfulness, tragicomedy, ordinariness; what looks like ordinariness will ask you to look again at Davis's writing. In its acuteness, it always asks attentiveness, and it repays this by opening up to its reader like possibility, or like a bush covered in flowerheads.<BR><BR>She's a joy. There's no writer quite like her' Ali Smith<BR><BR>'What stories. Precise and piercing, extremely funny. Nearly all are unlike anything you've ever read' Metro<BR><BR>'I loved these stories. They are so well-written, with such clarity of thought and precision of language. Excellent' William Leith, Evening Standard<BR><BR>'Remarkable. Some of the most moving fiction - on death, marriage, children - of recent years. To read Collected Stories is to be reminded of the grand, echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee. A writer of vast intelligence and originality' Independent on Sunday<BR><BR>'A body of work probably unique in American writing, in its combination of lucidity, aphoristic brevity, formal originality, sly comedy, metaphysical bleakness, philosophical pressure and human wisdom' New Yorker<BR><BR>'Davis is a high priestess of the startling, telling detail. She can make the most ordinary things, such as couples talking, or someone watching television, bizarre, almost mythical. I felt I had encountered a most original and daring mind' Colm Toibin, Daily Telegraph<BR><BR>Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris and Marcel Proust.

Mit 'Es ist, wie's ist' beweist Lydia Davis ihre große Meisterschaft in der kleinen Form. Sie betrachtet auf trocken-humorige und intelligente Art das, was zwischen uns und in uns selbst vorgehen kann. Auch noch so kleine Feinheiten und Details des Lebens entdeckt Davis und schenkt ihnen besondere Bedeutung.Eine Vielzahl an unterschiedlichsten Lebenssituationen und menschlichen Eigentümlichkeiten findet sich in den Stories, erzählt mit einem präzisen, klaren Blick: Alltagsspleens und -ängste, eben 'ein paar Dinge, die mit mir nicht in Ordnung sind'; ein Kassensturz über eine beendete Beziehung; eine Mutter, die mit ihrer Tochter nie zufrieden ist; eine Kriminalgeschichte, die als Französischsprachkurs getarnt ist; das Rätsel, was es wirklich mit dem Brief eines Ex-Freundes auf sich hat; 'Auszüge aus einem Leben', die einen ganzen Lebensverlauf im Schnelldurchlauf erzählen - und so vieles mehr.

From the International Man Booker Prize-winning author of Can't and Won't and The End of the Story - a crystalline collection of literary essays for fans of Susan Sontag and Joan Didion<BR><BR>'Among my most favourite writers. Read her now!' A. M. Homes <BR><BR>The visionary, fearless Lydia Davis presents a dazzling collection of essays on reading and writing, exploring the full scope of possibility within existing forms of literature and considering how we might challenge and reinvent these forms.<BR><BR>Through Thomas Pynchon, Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Lucia Berlin, Joan Mitchell and others, he author considers her many creative influences. And, through these lenses, she returns to her own writing process, her relationship to language and the written word. Beautifully formed, thought-provoking, playful and illuminating, these pieces are a masterclass in reading and writing.

Lydia Davis returns with a timeless collection of essays on literature and language.<BR><BR>'Precise, concentrated, lyrical. No one writes like Lydia Davis, and everyone should read her' Hanif Kureishi<BR><BR>'A writer as mighty as Kafka, as subtle as Flaubert, and as epoch-making, in her own way, as Proust' Ali Smith<BR><BR>Lydia Davis gathered a selection of her non-fiction writing for the first time in 2019 with Essays. Now, she continues the project with Essays Two, focusing on the art of translation, the learning of foreign languages through reading, and her experience of translating, amongst others, Flaubert and Proust, about whom she writes with an unmatched understanding of the nuances of their styles.<BR><BR>Every essay in this book is a revelation.

Can't and Won't is the new collection from Lydia Davis, one of the greatest short story writers alive.<BR><BR>WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013<BR><BR>Lydia Davis has been universally acclaimed for the wit, insight and genre-defying formal inventiveness of her sparkling stories.<BR><BR>With titles like 'A Story of Stolen Salamis', 'Letters to a Frozen Pea Manufacturer', 'A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates', and 'Can't and Won't', the stories in this new collection illuminate particular moments in ordinary lives and find in them the humorous, the ironic and the surprising.<BR><BR>Above all the stories revel in and grapple with the joys and constraints of language - achieving always the extraordinary, unmatched precision which makes Lydia Davis one of the greatest contemporary writers on the international stage.<BR><BR>Praise for Lydia Davis: <BR><BR>'What stories. Precise and piercing, extremely funny. Nearly all are unlike anything you've ever read' Metro<BR><BR>'To read The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is to be reminded of the grand, echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee. A writer of vast intelligence and originality' Independent on Sunday<BR><BR>'Among my most favourite writers. Read her now!' A. M. Homes<BR><BR>Lydia Davis is the author of Collected Stories, one novel and six short story collections, the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.

Endlich! "Unsere Fremden" ist die neueste, lang ersehnte Short-Story-Sammlung der US-Kultautorin. Die Einzigartigkeit und Genialität von Lydia Davis' Literatur wird einmal mehr aufs Eindrücklichste untermauert.Sie ist eine Virtuosin darin, die scheinbar beiläufigen, unbedeutenden Überraschungen des täglichen Lebens aufzuspüren und sie in kurze literarische Meisterwerke zu gießen. Pointiert, urkomisch, fabelhaft, melancholisch, doppelbödig, tiefgründig - es gibt kein Register, das Lydia Davis nicht perfekt ziehen kann. In "Unsere Fremden" werden Gespräche belauscht und falsch verstanden. Ein Eilbrief wird mit einem seltenen weißen Schmetterling verwechselt. Über zig Ecken werden an den Haaren Gründe herbeigezogen, weshalb die Erzählerin Anspruch auf einen gewissen Berühmtheitsgrad besitzt. Dahingemurmeltes im Gespräch zwischen Mann und Frau erzeugt herrlichste Situationskomik à la Loriot. Fremde können zu Familienmitgliedern werden und Familienmitglieder zu Fremden.

Ihre Erzählungen sind manchmal buchstäbliche Einzeiler; oder es sind lange geduldige Beobachtungen von Kühen im Laufe eines Winters vom Küchenfenster eines Landhauses aus. Ihre Stories können aber auch Träume sein, Beschwerdebriefe (an Tiefkühlerbsenproduzenten oder Autoren von Buchhändler-Werbebroschüren) oder Geschichten, die aus den Briefen Flauberts kondensiert wurden. Lydia Davis schreibt in allen Fällen mit großer Präzision, mit Witz und Intelligenz und einem geschärften Blick für die Unerfreulichkeiten des täglichen Lebens. Da sie nichts als gegeben hinnimmt, überschreitet sie auch ständig die Grenzen der literarischen Konventionen, der Genres und Gepflogenheiten - und das macht ihr Werk zu einer Fundgrube für überraschende Entdeckungen. Sie scheut weder das intellektuelle Vergnügen noch die Nähe der Intimität. Ob es sich um die ironische Aufzählung von Lesevorlieben handelt oder um die ungemein intimen Erinnerungen einer Frau an ihre verstorbene ältere Schwester, um die trocken notierten Schwierigkeiten mit renitenten Dienstmädchen oder die Essgewohnheiten von Großstadtneurotikern: Lydia Davis zu lesen erweitert nicht nur den Horizont, es weist uns auch auf unerwartete Freuden in unser aller rätselhaftem Alltag hin.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR: FICTION<BR><BR> 'A trailblazer in the world of short-form prose' New Yorker<BR><BR>Lydia Davis is a virtuoso at detecting the seemingly casual, inconsequential surprises of daily life and pinning them for inspection. In Our Strangers, conversations are overheard and misheard, a special delivery letter is mistaken for a rare white butterfly, toddlers learning to speak identify a ping-pong ball as an egg and mumbled remarks betray a marriage. In the glow of Davis's keen noticing, strangers can become like family and family like strangers.<BR><BR>Our Strangers is a fascinating collection that confirms the genius of a writer whose every attention is transformative.

An illuminating reflection on the creative process from acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, and translator Lydia Davis"Reporting from the slipstream of her reading life, [Davis] offers less a new way to think than perhaps an old one, pushing back against mechanization and the collapse of context by reframing reading in the most particular and human terms."-David L. Ulin, The Atlantic<BR> <BR>When asked why she writes, Lydia Davis confesses that the question makes her uncomfortable. Maybe she would rather not know. Instead, Davis considers how she writes her stories, how other writers write, and what insights the how might provide into the why.<BR> <BR>In this free-ranging exploration, Davis discovers that one reason she writes is for pleasure: the pleasure of encountering something that demands to be treated in language, of handling and manipulating the language into the form it ought to take, and, finally, of seeing a story exist where it didn't exist before. As she observes the processes of some of the authors who interest her the most, she finds that there seem to be as many reasons to write as there are writers: to relive an experience, to share an experience, to articulate something one has not quite comprehended.<BR> <BR>Reflecting on an eclectic mix of thinkers, including James Baldwin, Kate Briggs, Walter Raleigh, Christina Sharpe, Knut Hamsun, Grace Paley, Josep Pla, John Ashbery, and John Clare, Davis undertakes a clear-eyed, patient inquiry into the manifold reasons we choose to put pen to paper and begin something new.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023: FICTION<BR><BR> 'A trailblazer in the world of short-form prose' New Yorker<BR><BR>Lydia Davis is a virtuoso at detecting the seemingly casual, inconsequential surprises of daily life and pinning them for inspection. In Our Strangers, conversations are overheard and misheard, a special delivery letter is mistaken for a rare white butterfly, toddlers learning to speak identify a ping-pong ball as an egg and mumbled remarks betray a marriage. In the glow of Davis's keen noticing, strangers can become like family and family like strangers.<BR><BR>Our Strangers is a fascinating collection that confirms the genius of a writer whose every attention is transformative.

Bereits in ihrem ersten Buch beweist Lydia Davis ihre große Meisterschaft in der kleinen Form. Sie betrachtet auf ihre trocken-humorige und so intelligente Art das, was zwischen uns und in uns selbst vorgehen kann. Auch noch so kleine Feinheiten und Details des Lebens entdeckt Davis und schenkt ihnen besondere Bedeutung. Eine Vielzahl an unterschiedlichsten Lebenssituationen und menschlichen Eigentümlichkeiten findet sich in den Stories, erzählt mit einem präzisen, klaren Blick: Alltagsspleens und -ängste, eben 'ein paar Dinge, die mit mir nicht in Ordnung sind'; ein Kassensturz über eine beendete Beziehung; eine Mutter, die mit ihrer Tochter nie zufrieden ist; eine Kriminalgeschichte, die als Französischsprachkurs getarnt ist; das Rätsel, was es wirklich mit dem Brief eines Ex-Freundes auf sich hat; 'Auszüge aus einem Leben', die einen ganzen Lebensverlauf im Schnelldurchlauf erzählen - und so vieles mehr.Mit "Es ist, wie's ist" liegt jetzt das 1986 erschienene Debüt von Lydia Davis' großartiger Kurzprosa auf Deutsch vor - und somit sind die Collected Stories dieser Ausnahmeautorin vollständig übersetzt.